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 is a winner of the National Medal
of Technology and an inspiration for most if not
all of today's technology innovators. Among
many achievements, he demonstrated the first
computer mouse and the first use of a cathode-ray
tube to display computer text and graphics, but
his biggest contributions, through his Bootstrap
Institute and associated efforts, come in his
effort to inspire society to use innovation to
tackle complex problems in ethical ways.
What is your most
fervent hope for the future of networked
technologies? I have a concept I call
the dynamic knowledge repository that's both
a technology thing – how you hold it and
all the tools it has to work on it. But it is
also all of the conventions and processes and
skills it takes to gather all the information
that's available on a given complex-knowledge
problem, and then integrate it such that if there
are any inconsistencies, they're very clear
to people, if there are issues that are
unresolved, that's clear to people, if an
issue has been resolved, it's clear where it
is and what new knowledge is there, and
there'd be something too that has a lot of
facilitation for people to learn from it.
It's not assuming that you can sit there and
get taught. It's assuming that there are new
skills that you can develop for going after your
own understanding better. There's a lot of
technology and new skills and processes and
conventions involved, but going after that, which
I call the dynamic knowledge repository, is a
very very key focus and very important.
What technology
will have the greatest impact on our everyday
lives the next 10 years? Well, look out!
How would you tell a non-technical person 100
years ago about what automobiles were going to
do? …You'd describe the vehicle,
"It's just like this…" but
for almost anybody, whether they were technical
or not, by the time you got to telling them about
how everybody has a car, the garages they have,
the way driveway and home are, oh, the streets,
the parking regulations, the control, stoplights,
all of the conventions, you come to a four-way
street and four people are there like this and
there's a procedure you follow about who gets
to take the next turn, and you watch everybody
automatically doing it. They'd look at you
and couldn't imagine a world like that. All
those things are going to go up in the way in
which we deal with these new technologies,
too.
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